PEOPLE KEPT MELTING INTO THE GREAT PROCESSION AS IT wended its way in from the outskirts of town, so that before long, the marchers walked more than ten thousand strong.
Jim with his one leg was there on his crutches. John Lewis with a heavy gauze protecting his broken skull was there. Adam Simon was there, marching proudly in the front ranks, the pain in his foot just a footnote to the moment, a small price to pay for the privilege of being present. George Simon was there, too, unable to stop smiling. James Baldwin was there, walking among the masses like he was just another colored man. Pastor Columbus Porter and Reverend Lester Williams were there, thinking that it was all worth it, that the time, effort, and expense of driving down to Alabama, of staying in town in hopes the march would finally take place, was more than justified by the electric exultation of this moment.
And yes, Martin Luther King was there, smiling and waving at people he knew from the days when he had lived and pastored and led a historic bus boycott here. They called to him familiarly from the sidewalks, from the pool hall and the barbershop, from the porches of tumbledown houses, shanties of exposed wood on dirt streets.
As the procession moved into downtown, leaflets tumbled from the window of one of the office buildings. They carried an image of a much younger King seated attentively among an integrated audience in what looked to be a classroom. “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School,” blared the headline. People shook their heads. People laughed and crumpled the paper. People marched on.
They reached the fountain at Court Square, turned east onto Dexter Avenue. The white dome of the Alabama capitol was visible six blocks down.
The marchers spanned the wide avenue. They came singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “God Bless America.” They came laughing and joyous. They came in suits and ties and overalls, came toothless and ancient, came toothless and brand new to the world. They came bearing children on their shoulders. “This is history,” they whispered eagerly to their young. “Always remember this day.”
They came marching under flags from various U.S. states—Kentucky, New Jersey, Oregon, Hawaii. Someone even lofted the red maple leaf flag of Canada. And of course, American flags fluttered everywhere. Except, that is, from the dome of the Alabama capitol. Only the state flag and a Confederate battle flag hung there.
“Looks like Alabama has seceded again,” Adam said to no one in particular. People around him laughed.
The marchers kept coming. The minutes stretched to half an hour. The half hour doubled to over an hour. And still, they kept coming.
On a makeshift platform mounted in front of the statehouse, King’s aide, Andrew Young, announced the purpose of the convocation over loudspeakers. “This is a revolution,” he called, “a revolution that won’t fire a shot. We come to love the hell out of the state of Alabama.”
And the crowd, still gathering, thundered its approval.
Then Harry Belafonte, tall and handsome, skin the color of walnut shells, joined a group of white folk singers, including Mary Travers and Joan Baez, and sang hope songs to the strumming of a guitar. They sang “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” They sang “Blowin’ in the Wind.” They sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” They sang “Come and Go with Me.”
“Come and go with me to that land where I’m bound,” they sang, harmonies soft and soaring.
Ain’t no kneelin’ in that land.
Ain’t no mournin’ in that land.
There’ll be singin’ in that land.
Impulsively, Mary Travers kissed Harry Belafonte on the cheek. It was a gesture of affection, not sex. But white people swamped network switchboards with complaints over the awful implications of this blonde woman’s lips touching that brown man’s skin. CBS switched to a soap opera.
And still the crowd kept coming. Luther and Thelma moved to the landing atop the church stairs—the staircase was rapidly filling with spectators—to get a better view. Down in the crowd, Adam was grateful to be tall.
On the platform, Whitney Young of the National Urban League was rallying the crowd, reminding them that this march was not an ending, but a beginning.
“Will you march to the polls?” he demanded.
And the cry came back: “Yes!”
A parade of other dignitaries trooped to the microphone: the union leader A. Philip Randolph spoke, Ralph Bunche, Roy Wilkins, James Peck of CORE. Rosa Parks addressed the crowd, her voice slow and deliberate.
“The last few days in Selma,” she confided, “actually, I almost lost faith. I almost didn’t come here today because so many people told me not to come. I said to myself, I could not come here seeing what happened to people in Selma, who were armed with only love. However, I came here with a hope and a faith and you have given me back that faith today.”
“What do you want?” Ralph Abernathy demanded of the crowd.
“Freedom!” they shouted.
“I can’t hear ya!” he called, cupping a hand to his ear. “What do you want?”
And the cry was louder this time, more emphatic. “Freedom!”
“When do you want it?”
“Now!”
“How much of it do you want?”
“All of it!”
Abernathy grinned a folksy grin. “Aw shucks, now!”
Then he launched into a lavish introduction of the man he called “our leader,” and Martin Luther King stepped to the microphone. Luther, watching from the landing of the church steps, found him smaller than he’d have expected, a slight man in a dark suit with taller, more imposing men towering over him from behind. Then King spoke in the commanding baritone so familiar from a hundred newsreels and somehow, he became taller.
“They told us we wouldn’t get here,” mused King. “There were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies. But all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘We ain’t gon’ let nobody turn us around!’”
“Yes, sir!” cried his amen corner. “Yes, sir!” Approving cheers broke out among the audience.
The Selma campaign, King told his listeners, was exposing the root cause of racial segregation in the South. It had not come about, he explained, as a natural result of enmity between the races. Instead, it had been born as a political strategy, a divide-and-conquer ploy used by conservative Democrats to cleave white working men from colored ones and thereby reduce the ability of all of them to demand better conditions or higher wages.
He went on to explain how the politicians and the industrialists used the doctrine of white supremacy to keep white and Negro workers from coming together and forming what would have been an irresistible coalition for change. White workers labored under the threat that if they became too boisterous in demanding higher pay or better working conditions, the bosses would fire them and hire Negroes to work for even less pay in worse conditions. Thus, instead of working in cooperation, the Negroes and the whites were kept always in competition.
King, noted Luther with some surprise, was not so much preaching as teaching. There was only faint applause from people who had come for inspiration and were now receiving a history lesson instead. Even the encouragements from the amen corner began to seem more perfunctory than heartfelt.
Luther, who had read the same histories from which the great man was drawing his speech, was disappointed. Because King was exactly right. And the country would be radically changed—made radically better—if only more Negroes and white people understood the implications. Namely, that segregation was ultimately a con job used by those with money and power to keep those without it, whether black or white, in poverty and servitude. Luther was pleased to finally hear someone—particularly someone of King’s stature and visibility—speak this explosive truth. But was any of it getting through?
Judging from the apathetic demeanor of the crowd, Luther had to conclude that it wasn’t.
But King pushed doggedly on. “They segregated Southern money from the poor whites,” he cried, “they segregated Southern churches from Christianity, they segregated Southern minds from honest thinking, and they segregated the Negro from everything.”
“Yes, sir!” exhorted the amen corner, still trying to lift him up. But the applause was meager. King, thought Luther, was on the verge of losing his audience.
Perhaps the great man sensed the same thing. He shifted gears then, to describe the marchers as a people “on the move,” defiant in the face of racism, of churches burned and homes bombed.
It was as if a brisk wind had caught the sails of a drifting boat. “Let us march!” he repeated, over and over again, describing a righteous and determined advance that would desegregate housing, improve schooling, end hunger, and drive demagogues from public office. “Let us march!” he cried.
“Let us march!” the people echoed, their voices building to crescendos of urgency as they strained toward the utopia he described.
Then King said, “I know you’re asking today, ‘How long will it take?’”
And Luther, who had spent that very morning recalling the time he had challenged Johan Simek to answer that very question, stood straighter at those words, listened more intently, even as King answered his own question.
“I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again.
“How long? Not long! Because no lie can live forever.” The crowd was with him now, echoing the thunderclaps of his refrain.
“How long? Not long! Because you shall reap what you sow.
“How long? Not long! Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadows keeping watch above his own.” And now King seemed caught up in the whirlwind of his own words, taken to some high and holy place far beyond the streets of this little Alabama town, lifted to some lofty promontory from which he could see the very curve of history’s horizon, the shape of worlds yet to come.
“How long?” he roared. “Not long! Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
“How long? Not long? Because ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He’s trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat.’” King bore down hard on the word “never” as if daring someone to contradict him. And the stanzas of the old poem by Julia Ward Howe—“Battle Hymn of the Republic”—rang vibrant with his defiance.
“‘He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat,’” declared King, swept up now in the rushing passion of the poet’s words. “‘Oh, be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant, my feet. Our God is marching on. Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.’”
He turned from the podium then. People banged their palms together in ovation. They cried out in words that had no language. They wept. And Luther, who had lost God so long ago, could have sworn he almost felt something, some quickening in his chest, some slight pressure behind the eyes.
“How long?” cried a happy woman near him.
“Not long!” answered a man on the other side.
Luther felt himself being drawn toward an unfamiliar shore. He felt powerless to resist. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to.
In that moment, it was almost possible to believe—almost possible to believe—that change, that the dream about which both Johan Simek and Martin King had rhapsodized, was inevitable if not actually right at hand, that vindication was upon them all, that justice was just a short walk from here.
But he knew better than that, didn’t he? He was still the orphaned son of Mason and Annie Hayes, wasn’t he? This was still America, was it not?
True, all of it. Yet, Luther still felt … shaken.
He looked down on his sister. She was pounding her hands together, screaming with joy. Her eyes beamed.
“How long?” someone else cried.
“Not long!” another voice replied. Laughter. Slapping palms.
Luther shook his head, lit a cigarette with suddenly unsteady hands. He wiped impatiently at a lone tear that came straggling down his cheek.